Chapter 3

3.
“Time is Standing Still, from the unfinished opera Davy Crockett: Weill/Hays”

The next day was Wednesday. The sky was a cool, deep blue spotted here and there with brilliant white clouds. Joshua had just made love to his wife for the last time. It was by no means a love making session of any rigorous intensity, Hanna was eight months pregnant, but more of a Tantric exercise. Pressure and friction applied to all the familiar places, keeping time with their own music. To Joshua, it was a silent symphony composed in tandem with her. One he longed to recreate musically but never could. He left her in bed, her face flushed, her lips glistening, and with his head in a fog, he thought it good idea to walk to the Argentine Embassy then carry on to the Oper for mid-morning rehearsal. Though the score was far from complete, they were beginning work on Davy Crockett that day.

In Joshua’s next life, the one without Hanna, without Berlin, without anything, he would spend hours cloistered within the contents of his mind playing and replaying the events of that sunny day in November. He would shift the blame as if it was a pawn in a game of chess but never would he come out the winner. In his darkest of moments, he would blame the balmy weather, for that is what caused him to “try later” opting for a walk through Tier Garten to compose his love symphony for Hanna after he showed up at the embassy and found there was a line around the block. Had the day been gray, the park might not have seemed so tempting, with its light dusting of melting snow. In hindsight he would curse the park. He would curse the very sun in the sky.

Max too, was gone for the day. He had spent most of the night picking shards of porcelain out of the carpet and needed to get out of the house. He was to meet Maestro at the Oper around 10:30, but decided to spend the morning alone in a café with a large cup of coffee and a pornographic book covered in a brown paper sleeve. Max’s fatal error was opting to sit on the street instead of inside. For had he sat inside he might not have been noticed by an old acquaintance of his called Bruno Pesch, a skinny, shaky, former drug addict, turned distinguished storm trooper in Herr Fuhrer’s SA.

Max didn’t see him at first, absorbed as he was in a particularly steamy story about a couple of saucy school boys caught smoking by their professor. It was the hands around his neck that caught his attention.

“Ich nehme Sie, Made an!”

Max sprang to his feet, terrified, spilling his coffee and losing the sleeve of his book in the process. How exposed it looked on the pavement, flashing its indecent cover for all to see.

“What have I done?” Max asked, while in his mind he went over all the things he had done and wondered which of them he’d been caught on.

“Well, for one, you’re a lazy shit stain, sipping coffee while your brothers defend the Mother Land.” Bruno growled in his ear and released his chokehold. Then he sat down in the seat opposite where Max had been sitting and flagged down the waiter. “Two coffees. The lady will take hers sweet.”

“Bruno,” Max regained his composure and snapped up his book before anyone saw, “is that you?”

The young man smiled and broke out laughing. “You nearly pissed your pants, Maxie.” He looked good in his brown shirt. That was Max’s initial reaction. It had been years since he’d run into Bruno. But even the most decrepit of men looked better in uniform and Bruno was most certainly decrepit. The boy had a rottenness about him that was steeped in unpredictability. It made Max feel uneasy now, just as it always had.
He recalled one night in particular, during the years he ran with their group at the Oper. Bruno had been a skinny little thing, the runt of someone’s litter to be sure. He tried out for the chorus but had no natural talent and Maestro, feeling sorry for him, gave him over to the stagehands to assist with prop building. By this point Max was second chair violin (he had taught himself to play the previous summer) and self-designated captain of the children’s chorus, he was twelve, and Bruno was thirteen.

Naturally there was some jealousy where Max was concerned, but none felt it more intensely than Bruno. Half the time he was Max’s best friend, following him places like a stray dog, only to turn on him at the drop of a hat.

On the night it came to a head, Max was completely unaware of Bruno’s rage. Something had gone wrong during the previous evening’s performance that he had been reprimanded for. In Bruno’s eyes it was all Max’s doing and blamed him for the humiliation. So, at their leader's command, a bunch of the boys waited for Max after the show and gave him a bit of a beating. It didn't last very long. Dieter, the three-hundred-pound door man interrupted them; but Max was as sure as the day he was born, that if it had been allowed to go on, it would have ended with a violent violation of his person. In fact, he had a feeling that was Bruno’s goal all along.

Bruno was dismissed from the Oper after that. Max would see him around once in a while, usually drunk or high, making a nuisance of himself. But that was years ago. He wondered on occasion what had happened to Bruno, and now he knew.

“Max Schmied. Ich wusste, dass Sie mich nie vergessen würden,” he purred.

“Forgetting you would be quite impossible, Bruno.” Max wiped the coffee from his jacket. “And now that you’re all signed up, you think Herr Hitler would mind picking up my cleaning bill?”

“You’re still funny, Max. Funny, talented…” After all these years it seemed he still wasn’t over it.

“Hardly.” There was an awkward silence as the waiter brought their coffee.

“So, where are you living these days? A palace in die schweizerischen Alpen, I presume?”

“No, Bruno. I’m where I’ve always been, doing the same things I’ve always done,” and because he couldn’t resist the smallest of jabs, “I’m just a lot better at it now.”
“So, you’re still living with Streng?”

The nature in which Bruno asked this question sent a shiver down Max’s spine. Some light had gone on inside him and he was doing his best to hide it. It was as if all the roaches on the kitchen floor suddenly rotated their heads and uniformly caught sight of Maestro’s swinging bread slice. Max felt like the ant that tipped them off. He had to recover.

“Actually I was referring to the Oper, I’m still at the Oper.”

“So where are you living?”

Max smiled and leaned in to him. “Are you asking as a friend or as a soldier?”

“As someone looking out for your best interests.”

Max knew what Bruno was getting at and he had to stop it. He had to quash this train of thought before it gestated. He needed a distraction. “My best interests, how sweet of you. I took a room on the Alsen Strasse, you could come by, and we could discuss my best interests there, perhaps?” Max sipped his coffee and leaned back in his chair trying his best to keep cool as his heart pounded away in his throat.

Bruno watched him with narrowed eyes. “I think I’ll pass.”

“Are you sure?” Max licked a drop of coffee off the tip of his finger provocatively.
Bruno rose from the table, disgusted. “Quite sure. And I’d watch myself if I were you.”

With that Bruno left. He felt mocked yet again by Max. Nothing had changed. The bastard still thought he was better than everybody else. It had been Bruno’s intention, upon seeing Max, to warn him of the evening’s plans, for he had always been grateful to Maestro Streng for taking him in. But for Max to mock him like that, in public, it was cruel. He wondered as he walked away how Max even knew of his past? Was it common knowledge? He doubted it. Max was just the little shit he’d always been, picking at peoples weaknesses for his own amusement. It’s not as if it was Bruno’s fault that he was that way. He had been abused as a child, his development in that area messed with, that was why he longed for such things. Max had somehow found out and found it hysterical. He wondered what else he knew. Did Max know he got even? Maybe it was time for he and some friends of his to pay a little visit to the das Streng haus. Maybe it was high time they were all put in their place.

Max paid his bill and high tailed it down the street in the opposite direction. He was walking so fast, that he must have looked suspicious because a black shirt stopped him and asked to see his papers. He was such a ball of nerves that when he reached his identification, he accidentally produced the pornographic novella. The black shirt, far more imposing than Bruno could ever be, took it from him and turned it over in his gloved hand.

“What is your name?”

“Max Schmied, sir.”

“Sind Sie ein Homosexueller, Max Schmied?” The man asked without altering his expression. Max nearly fainted.

“No, sir. I mean to burn it. It is a piece of trash I found down along the Kurfurstendamm.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, sir.” Max oozed with the conviction of a liar.

“So burn it and I won’t arrest you.”

“Thank you, sir.” Max took the book back and was about to put it in his pocket.

“Now.”

“Now?”

The soldier handed Max a small box of matches. “Now.”

Max opened the box with shaking hands and found it contained only one match. Had he been less nervous he would have pondered the odds of this. “Go on, burn it.”

Trembling, Max struck the match and nothing happened. He tried again to no avail. How would he explain this to Maestro? He pictured himself being carted off to prison. He struck again. A flame. In haste, he moved the corner of the book into its path, and after a tense few seconds the little novella caught fire and was burning in his hand.

“It’s your lucky day.” The soldier seemed disappointed. “Where are you going in such a hurry?”

“The Oper haus. I’m late for work.” He thought it best not to lie any further.

“You are a singer there?”

“No sir, I’m a musician.”

The soldier looked him from head to toe and hearing a commotion down the street, moved on. When he was gone, Max extinguished the burning book and walked the rest of the way to the Oper slowly, with his eyes on his boots.

By the time he arrived, he had stopped shaking. He filed past his friends and co-workers without saying good morning, and sank into a chair in the darkened house. It was a good few minutes until he noticed Maestro sitting five rows behind, and seven seats over from him.

Joshua didn’t notice Max either, at first. He was thinking of something he had said to Hanna that morning and was wondering if there was any way to unsay it. It was silly really; he meant it as a joke. It’s not even that it offended her; it didn’t, as far as he could tell, but it bothered him that he had thought it to begin with.

“I love you so much, sometimes I wish I’d never met you,” he whispered.

“What?” She lifted her head and met his eyes.

“Then I wouldn’t have to live with this agony.”

“So loving me is agony?” On her lips was a half smile.

“Total.”

Did he really long for a simpler life? One in which he only had music, and perhaps Max, to worry about?

Before Joshua met Hanna, he was a card-carrying bachelor. Women took interest in him in much the same way one might take interest in a shabby performing dog. It’s altogether unsavory until it starts doing its little tricks; then you want to take it home, clean it up, and show it off to your friends. He would often find himself sitting at the piano at parties, wondering how he got there. There was this one fascinating creature, a woman with whom he was intimate, who invited him to a party and told him to bring along his violin since the house they were going to didn’t have a piano. He refused, and she cancelled their date on the grounds that such a God given talent had been wasted on an ungrateful egomaniac.

Hanna was different. She wasn’t looking for a performing dog; she had a true appreciation for music. The night they met, he didn’t play a note. They just talked. Talked about the theatre, about music. And while her understanding was very textbook, very art school, he enjoyed listening to what she had to say. She was level headed. She chose her words and arguments carefully. She absorbed his opinions and didn’t yes him to death like the cigarette smoking flapperatti. The night Joshua met Hanna; she must have told him he was wrong six times. To her there was very little room for subjectivity, even where art was concerned. He found her conviction charming. He also liked that she didn’t call him Josh Darling, till after they were married and that things were never referred to as being fabulous, unless they truly were fabulous. And another thing about Hanna, he didn’t fall in love with her right away. It started small, like a whisper, and grew and grew with every passing day. It was still growing. Just when he thought to himself, this is it, I can’t love anymore, my poor heart can’t take it, he would wake to find that he did, and would continue to until it killed him.
So that is why he said he wished he’d never met her. For the preservation of his poor galumphing heart, stretched to capacity. A beat skipping, bleeding, swooning, tortured muscle, all the worse for wear thanks to the pretty, olive skinned, Argentine Jewess with a parasite in her belly and the bad sense to have fallen for a weakling like him. He sat in the dark and pitied himself. Then he noticed Max.

“Is it eleven?” Maestro’s voice startled Max who had been caught in a reverie of his own, darkly thinking of what would have happened had he not been able to set fire to that book.

“I don’t know.”

“Is everything alright, Max?” Joshua stood and began to walk away. There was only one answer.

“Yes, Maestro.” He said to his back.

“Good. Rally the troops.” And their day began in Green County, Tennessee with Davy Crockett, and twenty native Germans in coonskin caps.